On 9 Oct 2002, Guillaume Cottenceau wrote: > Yes, though if the flexibility costs so much,
It doesn't cost that much. One hard prerequisite is to think it right. But Mandrake doesn't have to do this job themselves: that's what the FHS is for. Standards make things clear. Following them is not as hard as designing them. > it may become questionable whether we do it or we do other things > which may be more useful to a larger number of people. I see your > problem as something valuable but rather a "niche" than something > really useful to a large number of people. Linux is used in a lot of universities, with small or large networks of client machines. Sometimes, a cascaded system exists, where central servers provide common apps, and local admins can tune local things. /usr exists for that. The Unix hierarchy has been doing this for ages. Every package that breaks this is flawed. Big Cybercaf�s sometime use this, too. Having /usr mounted via NFS make it much easier to maintain and secure... if it doesn't break all packages. How can you tell newbie sysadmins that files in /usr are meant to be frozen, variable files go to /var, when kscd puts its growing stuff inside /usr ... Besides this, the lack of unattended package upgrade facility for clusters of machines, and the flakey distribution upgrade that makes the sysadmins prefer install from scratch instead, currently limit Mandrake to a lonely desktop machine -- or a collection of lonely desktop machines, until you roll your own local hack to cope with this. The solution we have here is our homemade package that installs and configures a list of things. (To my knowledge, MandrakeUpdateRobot didn't make the reliable unattended daily update we expected, but sorry, I've not tried 9.0 yet, things might have changed. As for the upgrade, from 8.1 to 8.2 did break many things when we tried, too many to fix. If things have gone better with 9.0, tell me.) I have other ideas for alternative solutions, but I'll tell in a different mail. -- St�phane Gourichon - Labo. d'Informatique de Paris 6 - AnimatLab http://animatlab.lip6.fr/ - philo du dimanche http://amphi-gouri.org/
